Regenerative all-optical wavelength multicast for next generation WDM network and system applications

We experimentally demonstrate regenerative all-opticalwavelengthmulticast by simultaneous multi-wavelength conversion of 10 Gb/s non-return-to-zero signals to four ITU 100GHz spaced channels with a receiver sensitivity improvement of 1.84dB and less than 0.14dB difference among all the multicast channels, using a single commercial monolithically integrated SOA-MZI. Themulticast device also exhibited about 22dB optical signal-to-noise ratio enhancement for all the converted channels compared to the original signal channel without wavelength conversion. Our experiment for the first time revealed the regeneration properties of a SOA-MZI device for WDM wavelength multicast purposes, and proved the excellent performance of a simple scheme for various future network and system applications, such as all-optical wavelength routing and grid networking